The Drax coal power station, the UK's largest CO2 emitter. MPs said today that trials of carbon capture and storage technology at the plant must be expedited. Photograph: James Cheadle/Loop Images/Corbis

Both Guardian CCS articles today make the mistake of stating that CCS will be fitted to the existing 4000 MW Drax Power Station. In fact the proposal is to build a smaller 400 MW coal-fired plant alongside to demonstrate a CCS variant known as oxyfuel combustion. You can read more at www.whiteroseccs.co.uk

The gas-fired Peterhead project is demonstrating another alternative CCS technology called post-combustion capture.

If proven, both these CCS variants could be used on a wide range of power plants and industrial plants (cement, steel) and it is those technology variants that is the important element of the proposals, not the type of the plant it is fitted to in the two demonstrations at White Rose and Peterhead.

A third CCS variant called pre-combustion capture is also being proposed elsewhere in the world for demonstration projects.

My verdict

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a vital technology for avoiding dangerous climate change. MPs, Shell, the IPCC, the energy industry, the IEA and environmentalists all agree, with a minimum of vitriol. It's almost eerie. Why is CCS, championed in every corner, stalling?

The large up-front cost of the test projects means governments are faced with investing billions in projects that they don't know will work. Fossil fuel companies meanwhile, have little incentive to stump the cash themselves until carbon pricing forces their hand. This means that despite some good initiatives, enthusiasm for investment has been lacking.

Of course the unanimity surrounding CCS is an illusion. Everyone likes this, but for different reasons. Fossil fuels companies like it, because it allows their business model to have a future without being culpable for breaking the carbon budget. Green groups like it because it offers an opportunity to reduce the carbon impact of industry. British MPs like it because Britain will be able to make lots of money burying other countries' emissions beneath the North Sea.

Perhaps the most convincing judgement is that of the International Energy Agency (IEA). Whose modelling shows that fossil fuel power with CCS is not simply a way to continue burning fossil fuels, but a key element of the cost-effective pathway to carbon abatement. A huge positive about this technology is the decarbonisation of the baseload power supply, thus complementing the impact of renewables, rather than competing with them.

Will it ever make fossil fuels safe? No. It will only ever capture most, not all, carbon emissions. And it might serve to slow the transition away from coal and gas. But it does offer the chance to make industries like steel and cement, for which we do not currently possess alternatives, much less polluting. For this reason alone it should be pursued. Further, the prospect of attaching CCS to bio-energy power plants and actually removing carbon from the atmosphere while producing electricity is a real and exciting prospect.

But today's wisest observation, from Dustin Benton and others, was that CCS alone cannot carry our hopes for a stable climate. We must continue to invest in all abatement technologies and not put all our money on the horse that is still in the stable.

Green group reaction

CCS is a difficult proposition for green groups. On the one hand, it has undeniable potential to move the world away from the precipice of dangerous climate change. But on the other, it makes business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels more likely than ever.

Fossil fuels can’t be safe even if we get CCS to work. The reason is that if we are to avoid the worst of climate change we need to cut carbon emissions massively. For example the UK’s Committee on Climate Change said by 2030 carbon emissions from electricity must be no more than 50 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. Yet even with CCS the best gas-fired power station will release double this. Our priority has to be on getting off fossil fuels. We will need to develop CCS technology but this is for use in industry and to in the future enable us to grab carbon pollution out of the atmosphere. The idea that CCS provides fossil fuels with a ‘get out of jail free card’ is a dangerous fallacy.

“After years of unnecessary delay, getting on with the task of demonstrating the technical and commercial feasibility of CCS is an urgent priority for this Government and the next.

“But the Government shouldn’t plan significant investments in new fossil fuel plants today on the assumption that CCS technology will be available at an affordable cost in the future to capture emissions when we simply don’t know that yet.”

Reaction from analysts

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is supportive of the findings of the ECCC report, said IEA analyst Simon Bennett. The agency's modelling shows fossil fuel electricity production using CCS would be a cost effective part of global decarbonisation. The price of coal and gas power with CCS is estimated to be slightly less than offshore wind but higher than onshore wind. Because the nascent technology has not been fully trialled, there could be movement in those numbers, but Bennett said engineering reports suggested any movement would be slight.

He stressed that direct comparison between renewables and CCS was a false one because CCS decarbonises the baseload and dispatchable power that underpins the electricity supply. Wind and solar remain affected by timing and weather. The addition of CCS also provides insurance against slower deployment of other technologies.

Bennett said:

"It is very clear that natural gas-fired power generation is not a low carbon source and will become a high carbon source on the grid in the not-too-distant future unless coupled with CCS. These are two challenges that could become critical in the medium term and so it would be disappointing if different low carbon options were presented as competing for the same public resources today. Against this backdrop, projects such as Peterhead cannot come online quickly enough."

Dustin Benton, head of resource stewardship at Green Alliance, said CCS "is not an either/or, it's an and". Both Benton and Bennett stress the application of CCS to industrial processes is one of the most important benefits associated with the technology. The cement and steel industries are significant CO2 emitters and CCS is the only viable way to reduce their climate impact. Benton also notes that the addition of CCS to bio-energy power stations will be technically possible as soon as it is proven to work on coal and gas plants. Thus creating the potential for negative emissions.

Benton also warned that banking on CCS to deliver the world from climate change was a "moral hazard". He said:

“It’s a technology with so much promise that it’s tempting to assume someone will develop it, and building our plans to decarbonise on this assumption. This would be a mistake. But a bigger mistake would be to write off the possibility of developing it in the first place. We don’t know if cost-effective CCS is possible, but if we don’t help fund demonstration plants, we’ll never know.”

Your comments

For 15 years, Statoil has been extracting natural gas from the Sleipner field in the middle of the North Sea. Here, nine per cent of the gas is CO2. Yet, in all that time, none of the CO2 has entered the atmosphere; instead, it has been pumped back into a layer of rock beneath the seabed. In this way, Statoil is preventing the release of an estimated one million tonnes of CO2 a year. CCS is a reality and has been for 15 years. What is proposed now is a scale up of the technology and a connection to a real power station. 40% of UK electric is from coal so CCS is needed for some time in the future until alternative low carbon sources are available.

The Guardian should employ some competent headline writers, instead of the ones who came up with that pathetic line. This isn't a simplistic question of whether something is safe or not, it is about whether CCS is practical and affordable.

Turning to the issue of CCS

1) we don't know whether it will work on a large scale or not. There is only one way of finding out, try it. Mathematical modelling can only go so far, in the end testing is needed in the real world (beyond the small trials such as the one at Longannet which tested the capture bit which have already been done).

2) it would be insane to build new coal fired power stations with an empty field/car park beside them where "the CCS plant will be fitted if/when it works". If it doesn't work the new plant will not be ripped down, so we would lock ourselves into decades of high emissions.

3) the only sane way of testing whether it works on a large scale is to fit it to an existing plant, preferably coal, but possibly gas. This would test the transport and storage aspects fully, and some of the capture options. If it works then new plant can be built with other forms of capture which cannot be tested at an existing plant.

4) after a large trial we can evaluate how expensive it will be in a developed form. At the moment the estimated costs of CCS are probably unaffordable. The high price of a trial is worth paying to find the answer to the question of whether costs can be reduced. I recall seeing that the Longannet trial had identified ways of reducing some costs.

I worked on the Longannet CCS FEED study and it was obvious as soon as the Coalition government took over that the scheme wasn't going to go ahead.

I don't honestly believe they have any real interest in helping to develop the technology despite the potential business that could be generated for UK firms who would acquire the expertise to be leaders in the field.

Energy sector reaction

“The ECC Committee’s report on CCS and its recommendations is extremely timely – and we very much share their concerns and frustrations on the substantial delay to the development of CCS in the UK. We strongly support the recommendations of the Committee, particularly in relation to the need for speed on projects both within and outside of the CCS competition.

"As well as highlighting the importance of successfully concluding the current competition we are extremely pleased to see that the Committee has identified the need for clarity surrounding the availability of CfDs for non-competition projects. There is a very real risk that, without a strong signal that these projects can access a CfD in parallel with the competition, these projects will be shelved.

"There is no credible scenario for cost-effectively tackling climate change without CCS. The sooner we build the first projects, the sooner we will be on the path towards meeting this goal whilst delivering the significant benefits that a mature CCS industry can offer."

“While CCS has a role to play in decarbonising the energy mix, there is no single silver bullet in the energy trilemma. CCS is yet to be proven at scale, but renewable energy is here today and is already making a difference, slashing our emissions, creating jobs and bringing down its costs. We need a clear framework for decarbonisation to 2030, at UK and EU level, with targeted support for renewables to give investors confidence and keep the momentum in renewables going. An exciting prospect for the future is the combination of CCS with bioenergy, offering the prospect of carbon-negative energy generation that actually sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere.”

“Our own research has found that the costs of meeting the UK’s low-carbon targets could double to £60bn a year by 2050 at today’s prices without the use of CCS. Our research mirrors and supports much of the ECC’s report whose publication we welcome today."

Poltical reaction

Energy Minister Michael Fallon said:

“The UK is ahead of the rest of Europe with two CCS projects in White Rose and Peterhead actively undertaking detailed engineering studies ahead of full construction. As well as the £1 billion we are investing in CCS, there will also be additional support through low-carbon Contracts for Difference for a number of years to come, so it’s important we take the time to get our decisions right and follow a robust process.

"Our vision for CCS in the UK does not stop at these first projects. We want to see a strong and successful CCS industry able to compete on cost with other low carbon technologies in the 2020s.”

Tom Greatrex MP, Labour’s shadow energy minister, said:

“The government attitude towards CCS has been one of damaging neglect. It appears to be uninterested in the enormous potential for CCS in the UK. In our efforts to decarbonise, CCS is not an option but a necessity.”

Challenges

CCS makes sense on paper, but it has been difficult to deliver in reality. It requires enormous initial investment to create a working trial. Estimates of how much it will cost to deliver a working plant range from £1-2 billion. Unlike renewables, where it is possible to incrementally scale up from small trials, CCS has to begin at full size. For this reason it is a risky political proposition. What treasurer is willing to throw a billion pounds at an unproven technology?

Fossil fuel companies are assisting with the development of this technology. This week JJ Traynor, vice president of investor relations at Royal Dutch Shell, wrote a letter to investors extolling the advantages of CCS. Traynor wrote:

"Without CCS, emissions reduction will be more difficult, disruptive to the world's economy, standard of living and cause more economic hardship."

What he did not say explicitly is that without CCS, emissions reduction would require a huge cut in the burning of fossil fuels. Meaning more economic hardship for Shell. But uncertainty over the way that governments will punish polluters in the future (through carbon pricing etc) means that big oil and gas companies are still happy to shift the bulk of the burden for CCS research onto governments.

This graph from the Global CCS Institute shows the proportion of CCS projects in various stages of planning globally versus the number actually in operation. None of the operational projects areattached to large-scale power plants.

CCS projects are also being developed in the UAE, Canada and the US, three of the world's fossil fuel heartlands. A $1 billion project in Saskatchewan, Canada will be the first large scale commercial CCS facility when it starts up later this year. It will sell one million tonnes of CO2 to an oil company to be used in enhanced oil recovery (EOR). This involves injecting gas into the oil reservoir in order to force more to the surface. This use for CCS stretches the believability of claims that the technology is only a stop-gap that will help us transition away from fossil fuels.

A report from Orion Innovations outlines the various approaches to CCS being trialled in the UK.

The capture process may take one of three forms:

Pre-combustion involves converting solid, liquid or gaseous fuel into a mixture of hydrogen and carbon dioxide via gasification or reforming. The remaining hydrogen rich fuel can be burnt in modified turbines to produce electricity or is available for use in industrial processes or potentially transport applications. Pre-combustion coal is also known as Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) with CCS.

Post-combustion involves separation of CO2 from flue gas using a range of processes including membranes, cryogenic distillation and absorption. Due to the low concentration of CO2 in the post combustion gas, this requires large scale equipment, able to process large quantities of gas.

Negative emissions?

One of the most exciting potential applications of CCS is it potential use in bio-energy power plants. Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (Beccs) could actually achieve negative emissions. Removing carbon from the atmosphere using the photosynthesis of plants, which are then burned for energy. The CO2 produced could then be trapped and stored underground.

The International Energy Agency's (IEA) 2013 World Energy Outlook concluded that CCS (and especially Beccs) was a "distant" but "essential" technology for avoiding more than 2C of global warming. The IEA said:

"Such negative emissions result when the amount of CO2 sequestered from the atmosphere during the growth of biomass (and subsequently stored underground) is larger than the CO2 emissions associated with the production of biomass, including those resulting from land-use change and the emissions released during the transformation of biomass to the final product. So-called bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (Beccs) could be used in a wide range of applications, including biomass power plants, combined heat and power plants, flue gas streams from the pulp and paper industry, fermentation in ethanol production and biogas refining processes."

What is carbon capture and storage?

Carbon capture and storage (CCS), as the name suggests, is a technology designed to silo CO2 released during industrial processes and store it underground in aeternum. Development has focused on the application of CCS to fossil fuel power stations, but it could be used in any industry with high carbon emissions.

According to the ECCC report, CCS technology could potentially keep the world from breaching its carbon budget. Since industrialisation, humans have emitted 515 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC). At least 780 GtC remain in fossil fuel reserves. But the world must stay beneath a total of 1000 GtC in order to avoid the 2C increase in temperature that scientists have highlighted as a climactic point of no return. The IPCC said in 2005 that the potential underground storage capacity for CCS is 545 GtC.

The carbon would be stored in the same geological formations from which it came in the first place. The ECCC report today said the UK was well placed to employ the technology because of the proximity of the North Sea oil and gas fields, many of which are depleted. In a bizzare future, the UK could sell fuel to the rest of Europe and then Europe would have to pay the UK to take it back.

The Geological Society (GS) said today "the science and engineering associated with CCS are not significant barriers to large-scale delivery of CCS – the principle constraints are political and economic". Dr Jerome Neufeld from the University of Cambridge, who convened a GS workshop on the technology, said:

“CCS in depleted oil and gas reservoirs and other ‘conventional’ geological settings is a low risk technology with huge potential to reduce future carbon emissions. If this potential is to be realised, urgent action is needed to develop subsurface storage capacity at a far faster rate than at present. The geology of the UK’s near offshore, and its history of oil and gas exploration and production in the North Sea, presents a major opportunity for the UK to play a leading role in the global development of CCS technology.”

When fitted to a power plant, CCS will reduce CO2 emissions by 80%-90%. For the UK's biggest emitter the Drax power station, one of two places it is being trialled in the UK, this could mean a reduction of almost 20 million tonnes of CO2 each year. This single facility could therefore reduce the UK's carbon footprint by close to 3.5%.

The government launched its first CCS competition in 2007 with the expectation that any funded projects would be operational by 2014. Suffice to say they're not. The two awardees from that competition - E.On's Kingsnorth project and Scottish Power's Longannet scheme - terminated their plans in 2010 and 2011 respectively.

After scathing criticism from the National Audit Office for its handling of the first competition, the government launched a redesigned CCS funding scheme in 2012. Capture Power Limited's White Rose project was awarded funding in 2013, with Shell and SSE's Peterhead project getting the nod a year later.

Both those projects are now in the development stage, with the government hoping the projects will be in operation by 2020. But despite the government's renewed commitment, there are "mixed views" within the industry as to whether such a date is feasible, the committee reports, and chair Tim Yeo calls the government's approach "a model example of how not to support a fledgling industry" .

Tim Yeo MP, chair of the ECCC, said: “After nearly a decade of delay, the Department of Energy and Climate Change has finally got near to delivering two pilot CCS projects in the UK. It must now fast-track these projects and reach final investment decisions before the election to ensure this technology can start delivering carbon savings by the 2020s.”

Welcome to the eco audit

MPs have urged the UK government to fast track the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, saying its success is fundamental to avoiding dangerous climate change.

Using CCS, power stations and other industries would store their carbon emissions underground. Advocates of the technology say it could turn fossil fuel power stations into genuinely low carbon sources of power.

Chair of the energy and climate change select committee (ECCC), Tim Yeo MP, said CCS was "absolutely vital if we are to avoid dangerously destabilizing the climate". A report released today by the ECCC said the government should offer the sector the same fixed-price electricity contracts that are available to the nuclear and offshore wind industries. It said this would provide investors with certainty that plants using the technology can be competitive.

Many governments and oil companies climate change strategies rely on CCS in order to continue burning fossil fuels without blowing the global carbon budget. But after almost a decade of stalled initiatives and a government promise of £1 billion to kick start trials, CCS has failed to demonstrate its viability on a large scale.

Will CCS ever come of age? Join in today’s discussion by contributing in the comments below, tweet me or email me. If you are quoting figures or studies, please provide a link to the original source. Follow me on @karlmathiesen for updates throughout the day and later I will return with my own verdict.